This invention concerns compounds that have been found to be active as gametocides. These compounds are derivatives of N-phosphonomethylglycine, which is usually called glyphosate.
An effective gametocide is a compound that, when applied to a plant during sexual maturity, is capable of killing or effectively terminating the development of a plant's male gametes while leaving the plant's female gametes, or at least a significant proportion of them, capable of undergoing cross fertilization with subsequent high yields of fertile, viable hybrid seed.
Many compounds are capable of killing the male gametes of a plant, indeed almost any systemic herbicide is effective in this role. However most also kill the female gametes and the rest of the plant and are therefore ineffective gametocides. Additionally, while some compounds can be applied at rates such that substantially only the gametes are affected, most are found to be fairly non-discriminating regarding the sex of the gametes destroyed.
A requirement of the ideal gametocide, therefore, is that the application level at which male gametes are effectively destroyed should be significantly lower than that required to destroy also the female gametes. Thus a gametocide should be capable of being spray applied in the field without extraordinary precautions against accidental overdoses.
Other desirable characteristics may be dictated by the plant to be treated. As an example, wheat is by nature self-pollinating as the male and female gametes are found inside the same flower which remains closed until the male gametes release their pollen onto the female gametes to fertilize them. Thus, when the flower opens fertilization is normally essentially complete. For a gametocide to be useful on wheat it must, besides killing the male gametes, not interfere with the opening of the flower when the female gametes are ready to be fertilized such that fertilization by pollen from other wheat plants, perhaps of a different strain, can occur.
The utility of gametocides lies in precisely this area of plant hybridization. By causing pollination of one variety of a plant species by a different variety of the same species, a hybrid plant is obtained. By careful selection of the parents, hybrids can be obtained with specific combinations of desirable traits such as plant size, grain yield disease resistance, herbicide tolerance, climatic adaptation, plant growth regulator response, and so on.
Hybridization utilizing cytoplasmic male sterility is available and is often used to produce commercial hybrid corn seed. However, techniques using the cytoplasmic male sterility system can take years to develop lines to the point that commercial quantities of hybrid seed can be produced. Use of an effective gametocide significantly reduces this development time by fifty percent or more.
Some plants, such as corn, can be relatively easily hybridized without resort to genetic techniques because the organ containing the male gametes are exposed and can easily be removed. These systems leave the female gametes, when ready for fertilization, accessible to any foreign corn pollen that is deposited thereon. As indicated above, however, this is not the case with plants such as wheat in which the male and female gametes develop together inside the same closed flower.
The significance of an effective gametocide is therefore that it provides a tool for the development of advantageous hybrids of plants that hitherto have been very difficult to cross-pollinate.
The present invention provides a group of novel compounds that are found to possess the gametocidal utility described above. The best of these gametocides are very effective in the production of high yields of fertile hybrid seed.